Former slaves and other African American residents of the Kelly Settlement north of Hattiesburg founded this school in 1879. By the 1950s, five frame buildings made up the campus—a cafeteria, a vocational agricultural shop, a teacher’s house, and two 1920s classroom buildings constructed with the help of the Rosenwald Fund. After the campus was abandoned in the late 1950s following school consolidation, Vernon Dahmer, an alumnus and school trustee whose property adjoined the school, bought it. As president of the Forrest County NAACP, he used the school for community meetings and Freedom schools. A Ku Klux Klan firebombing killed him in his home on January 10, 1966. Within the year, the Hattiesburg Chamber of Commerce helped fund a new house (796 Monroe Road), designed by Peter J. Baricev and built by Mennonite volunteers. The ensuing conviction of several Klansmen by all-white juries was credited with breaking the back of the Klan in south Mississippi.
The school’s lone surviving building originally matched Rosenwald Plan No. 20 but was renovated in the late 1940s as an auditorium, with two classrooms in a rear addition. It served as a Head Start and daycare center before being damaged in Hurricane Katrina. Owner Dennis Dahmer, youngest son of Vernon and Ellie, repaired the building to the designs of Albert and Associates, with the aid of grants from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.